4 Hard Workouts to Ease You Back Into Tough Training

Editor’s Note: This post is written by guest contributor, Christine Skopec, and has been edited for length and clarity.

School starts near the end of August where I grew up in Iowa. The first day was on Monday for years, but my district switched to a midweek start when I got to high school. Whoever made that call was onto something, because it helped ease everyone back into student mode.

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I think the same gentle transition can be useful when you’re coming back from an injury or just starting to prepare for a big race. Finding something in between easy and grueling can help you build your fitness and also mentally prepare you for more rigorous workouts in the future. Here are four ideas you might like.

4 Hard Workouts to Ease You Back into Tough Training

1. Fartlek

Swedish for “speed play,” fartleks have long been a go-to workout for runners. I love them because they’re endlessly adaptable. You can design them to be incredibly challenging, but they can just as easily work as an intro to harder efforts. One of my standards is 3 minutes at 5k race pace followed by 2 minutes of easy running.

Another great thing about fartleks is you don’t typically feel the same pressure to hit a certain number of repeats. If you plan to do five fast segments and only end up doing four, you can just make your cool-down longer. And if you’re feeling great? Simply complete an extra round or two.

2. Ladder fartlek

This variation can be more challenging than the one above, but it doesn’t have to be. It all depends on what you’re after. More than anything, varying the length of both your hard and easy portions helps break things up. This can be helpful if you tend to get a little bored with a more repetitive fartlek.

My favorite ladder workout looks like this:

1 minute speed/1 minute recovery

2 minutes speed/1:30 minutes recovery

3 minutes speed/ 2 minutes recovery

4 minutes speed/ 2:30 minutes recovery

5 minutes speed/ 3 minutes recovery

4 minutes speed/2:30 minutes recovery

3 minutes speed/2 minutes recovery

2 minutes speed/1:30 minutes recovery

1 minute speed/1 minute recovery

Keeping your pace roughly the same for each of the faster segments will definitely pose a challenge, but you can step it up even more if you like. For example, you could focus on 10k pace for every segment through the 5-minute one, then switch to 5k pace for the rest.

3. Hill intervals

I know, I know. Most people only start hitting the hills when they’re deep into a training plan. Here’s the thing, though. You don’t have to run the entire hill. I used to live near an ascent I frequented for workouts, and running the whole thing would have resulted in half-mile intervals. That just isn’t practical when you’re easing back into things.

Instead of letting the hill dictate the start and finish lines, choose them yourself. I picked a tree near the bottom and ran a challenging, but manageable, pace until 50 to 60 seconds had passed. I noticed a street sign to my left at about that time, so it became the finish line. Repeat as needed.

4. Broken tempo

When I was in college, I had been doing (and dreading) tempo runs for years. The idea with a tempo is that you’re running near your lactate threshold for a sustained period of time, which will eventually help you build strength and speed.

I’ve always thought the mental exhaustion that comes from trying to focus for 5 solid miles was the hardest part. It’s not the craziest idea, either. You’ve probably experienced diminishing performance on a school or work project when you tried to push through without taking a break — the same thing can happen in athletics.

Though research is somewhat limited, there have been several trials demonstrating a link between mental fatigue and decreased athletic performance. The interesting part about these studies is they illustrated psychological factors negatively impact endurance performance even though typical measures like lactate threshold and heart rate aren’t affected.

Imagine my delight when a college coach introduced me to tempo runs broken into smaller pieces. Broken tempos, sometimes called cruise intervals, can help prevent mental burnout. You can focus on distance or time, but the idea is the same either way. You run a few relatively long stretches of hard effort, each separated by a couple minutes of recovery.

I learned two that I think can be useful. One is 2×2 miles with 4 to 5 minutes of recovery in between. The other is 3×10 minutes with 3 minutes of recovery after each segment. I typically start with the second option when I’m getting back into the swing of things. Soon enough, 800-meter intervals don’t seem so intimidating.

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About the Author

Christine started racing in fun runs as a kid, and never really stopped. These days you can find her hitting the pavement all across the Twin Cities to train for a 5k, marathon, or whatever else she has planned. She also loves reading, writing, cooking, and meeting fellow running nerds.

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